But we now have fail caterpillar

According to the social network, "most users" ran into issues accessing the service on the web and via mobile apps starting at 11:01 a.m. PDT (6:01 p.m. GMT, 5:01 a.m. AEST).

"We're looking into it," Twitter concluded in a brief service issue message on its Status page.

The status was later updated to reveal that during a planned deploy of a core service, "unexpected complications" arose, rendering Twitter "unavailable for many users." A tweet from the Twitter Support account said "most users were impacted by a service outage."

The birdie bunch rolled back the change as soon as it ID'd the issue and began a "controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service."

It's sorry for any inconvenience, by the way.

What a cute bug!

While the outage was short lived - though perhaps long in Twitter time - it introduced a new "fail" creature.